LONG READ Brendan Fanning: 'So far the tour on Australian soil has lacked jeopardy.'

You’d wonder how much time Joe Schmidt has spent dissecting the Lions over their four games from Dublin through Perth, Brisbane and Sydney, and what that looks like when set aside that hoary old default: ‘We’re concentrating more on ourselves than the opposition.’

So, four games in which the tourists have managed at last to use all 38 men in their initial squad; four games for them to climb the twin peaks of sharing pitch time around with bedding-in systems and structures. In the circumstances Schmidt’s time spent on the Wallabies opener against Fiji must have been a distant second. With the Brumbies next up he already has enough intel on the Lions to know what he’s dealing with; tucked away now with his impressions of what his own crew are looking like. At a rough guess his sleep stats are not what the experts recommend.

Of course he figured the Lions’ attack shape would be not a million miles removed from Ireland’s. The issue was always going to be around the number of questions that shape could throw at opponents, and the degree of expertise the Lions might bring to that by the time the Test series kicks off in a fortnight. Clearly they still have a way to go.

Schmidt has a theory on this. From his time with Leinster and Ireland, and possibly with Auckland and Clermont before coming to Ireland in the summer of 2010, he has come to the conclusion that it’s not about the opposition knowing the name of the game, it’s about their ability to react quickly enough in real time to do something about it.

Here’s an example: when Ireland played Australia in the 2024 November series in Dublin their tighthead Taniela Tupou read the tea leaves at one point, with the game in the balance, and intercepted an Ireland strike play that saw him cover the guts of 40 metres before offloading cleverly. The play in question had been on the menu of things to watch for, cooked up by their coach and served with all the cues. Tupou was triggered by good preparation. As the players were getting a laugh out of Schmidt for his full-on attention to detail, he reminded them that with top class execution from the attack the defence should still be in trouble. Another fortnight of repetition in training will nudge the Lions closer to the strike rate they need to hobble the Wallabies. And Schmidt knows this. As does Felipe Contepomi, whose Pumas got the Lions off to a losing start in Lansdowne Road in the tour opener last month.

“Completely, yeah – I’m on that page,” Contepomi says. “I know for Joe that’s his bread and butter, in terms of how he runs the set plays. I think that especially when you have moves where there are two or three options you can pick, and you trust the decision maker to pick the right option, it’s very hard to defend. And I think that’s great, you know, for rugby. The difficult part is running and executing it all perfectly: all of them, all the lines perfect. And that’s where sometimes if one line is not correct, or doesn’t hold the defender that needs to be held, then the defence won’t be broken up.”

The drive for perfection may be the enemy of good, but repetition of the right stuff surely is the best friend of very good. The latest instalment against the Waratahs left Farrell with the hump about the state of the pitch and the state of his players’ coping mechanisms. Currently they are in a vortex between trying very hard to get the battle plan up to speed and knowing when to back off a bit. But they’ll get there.

What Schmidt might be more upbeat about however is the prospect of getting a happy ending to brutish phase play in the Lions 22. The tourists have been slow to get off the line on defence in their own 22, especially early in games. Well maybe not that slow, given the prevalence of penalties for rear-foot offside, but slow to get everyone on the same page so they can shut down blunt attacks. This will be critical if Schmidt has Rob Valetini and Will Skelton in the mix. He’s making positive noises on that front, knowing the value of that payload.

I think the Lions will get better in defence. They will get better because they’ll get cohesion from working one beside the other, and at the start that’s hard with different players coming from different countries, with different systems.

Felipe Contepomi

“Yeah, it makes sense now but I think the Lions will get better in defence,” Contepomi says. “They will get better because they’ll get cohesion from working one beside the other, and at the start that’s hard with different players coming from different countries, with different systems. When they adapt to the new system they will get better, for sure.

“Now, having said that, for example, in our game against them they had 75 percent possession, so we were doing more defending. I don’t think they will get 75 percent possession against Australia in the first Test. But if they do that I’m pretty sure that they will score more points than they will concede, because they will be more cohesive. So, yeah, it’s a matter of being more effective on defence when you enter your own 22, but I’m sure they will correct that. It won’t be that easy for Australia to break up the Lions in two weeks’ time.”

No, but it will be the first time for the tourists to be facing opposition where everyone is worth their place – unlike the preamble to this point – and making that statement in the cauldron of a Test match. So far the tour on Australian soil has lacked that bit of jeopardy, the fear for Farrell that he’ll have to mend a badly broken fence in a hurry. But clearly the splinters are causing him pain.